Categories
E-learning

Computers For Good

Introducing the Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a deck of cards, cheap enough at £40 to give away to children and designed to help with teaching programming.

I grew up playing around on a ZX Spectrum computer at home and a BBC Micro at school.  I remember programming the computers using the BASIC programming language and at aged ten writing a BASIC program as part of a school history project.

These days PCs hide programming away and kids are less inclined to delve under the hood.  I hope a new generation will grow up programming on the Raspberry Pi, like I did on the BBC Micro.

I’ve been playing around with a Raspberry Pi and as a project I set it up as a Linux web server with a WordPress blog on it.

Which you are reading on now.

Update 2021: I just updated it to do some clever stuff with a new technology called Gatsby that makes it kind of fast*.

(* nothing to do with the Leonardo DiCaprio film.)

If you want your WordPress blog to have a 90% page speed rating from Google too then do contact me.

They use speed as a reason to boost your website to the top of the rankings now – I know a bit about Search Engine Optimization.

Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimisation

Note: I did upgrade the SD Card[1] while I was at it, and this did cost £8. But it has a 10 year warranty so that’s brings it down to 80p a year. Not bad on top of a £40 investment in 2014 (actually I didn’t buy it, my Mum gave it to me for Christmas, give one to the whizz kid in your life and do them a favour – caveat get them to read this first: a cautionary tale.)

[1] Note to future selves – Go for a 32GB Card for Raspberry Pi 2 [advert] like this one [/end of advert], bigger than that gets complicated, and this is 4x the 2014 card it came with anyway so pretty generous.

Louie Christie
By Louie Christie
Adventurous, tech geek, available to hire, underground comedian in my own head. 😬
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